How To Get Hair Like The Weeknd

Then I show up at Grimes's house on a Tuesday afternoon. Grimes'southward real proper name is Claire Boucher, and she answers to Grimes or Claire, or fifty-fifty ameliorate, c, as in the speed of low-cal. But ever since she began dating the richest man in all of human civilization, and specially since she had a child with him in May 2020—a boy they call 10 Æ A-12, which she pronounces "Ten A.I. Archangel," or X for curt—she's had to learn to make peace with much of the world erasing her identity as one of the past decade'south most fearless, adventurous solo artists and coming to know her, first and foremost, as Elon Musk'due south girlfriend.

For a person who has spent her entire life flinging herself at the earth and making fine art out of the combustions, her new being has required some adjusting. Discretion does not come naturally to her. Last year, someone posted a seven-infinitesimal mash-up on YouTube titled "Grimes oversharing in interviews compilation." "She has no filter—what is in her mind comes out her mouth," says Liv Boeree, a former World Serial of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and fell madly in friendship with after a marathon conversation about bogus intelligence. "I discover information technology so refreshing and exhilarating, but obviously information technology causes her problem."

Once upon a time, this was part of Grimes'due south charm, simply at present an errant remark could follow her kid for life, or crater Tesla's stock, or tip off people about where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are nix new for her—she'south a female person pop star in 2022—only these are people trying to outmaneuver the guy who runs Tesla and SpaceX (and founded the Slow Visitor and Neuralink). They rail his private jet and post its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. Once they notice him, they find her soon plenty, and and then they find X.

"We movement and motion and move," she'll tell me after, "because people keep finding where we live."

Grimes opens the front door wearing a double-layered cream and black shirt, made by a Korean designer friend's label, with the word algorithm stitched in red on the collar and cuffs. She invites me in with a cheerful hello, then apologizes for the spartan conditions. She'southward simply just moved into this firm, which belongs to friends. X is with his father until tomorrow, so the house is dim and silent.

Nosotros settle into a cozy nook off the entryway, the one room she's had fourth dimension to Grimes up with some anime-inspired decor she purchased during a wee-hours Ambien-fueled spree on Etsy. For the next iv hours, as she and I carve up a six-pack of some local craft beer and get slowly buzzed because we're both lightweights, Princess Mononoke glowers at me from a thin blanket backside her on the couch. Covering the floor is an enormous Expiry Notation carpeting, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime TV series about a teenager who can dictate the time and manner of anyone's death past writing it down in a volume. (It's on Netflix.) Death Note is the chief inspiration for Grimes's contempo single "Shinigami Optics," too as the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. "I similar making friends with demons," Grimes chants in her demon-baby singing voice. "Y'all need special eyes to run across 'em."

Grimes is an invigorating hang. Fourth dimension flies around her in nonlinear fashion. Art and ideas are her power source, and her energy is infectious. She speaks so fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley three.0 futurism, and club-kid slang. At one point she hops up to testify me her new tattoo, a series of milky-white slashes on her upper trunk meant to look like alien scars. All the same for someone who might be from another planet, she'due south remarkably downward-to-earth. For someone who'south and so excited about A.I., she certain does dearest the visitor of people.

Clothing past Louis Vuitton; sleeve past Urstadt.Swan; rings by Egonlab. Throughout: hair past Garren; makeup by Kabuki; manicure by Mei Kawajiri; set pattern past Stefan Beckman.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN KLEIN. STYLED BY PATTI WILSON.

About 15 minutes after we sit to discuss her new music, a "space opera" due this spring-ish tentatively called Book one, I hear what sounds vaguely similar a lone cry from an baby upstairs. I recollect I notice Grimes wince, but I say nothing and movement on. Could be anything.

Another few minutes laissez passer. Just as I'thousand about to bring up ane of Volume 1's highlights, a soon-to-exist-ubiquitous banger called "Sci-Fi" that she cowrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer Illangelo, I hear it again. This time information technology'southward multiple cries, and it's unmistakable. I've got two kids. That's a baby. And I tin can tell past the frozen expect on my host'southward face up that she heard it as well. So I brace myself to ask the strangest question of my career: Do you have another infant in your life, Grimes?

Her body clenches and she looks abroad.

"I'thou not at liberty to speak on these things," she begins, and then all in a tumble she says: "Whatever is going on with family unit stuff, I merely feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there. I mean, I call back East is actually seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out there. His state of affairs is like that. Just, yeah, I don't know."

She's rattled, and I'm mortified past fifty-fifty accidentally making a adult female—a new mother, no less—feel exposed and vulnerable. I suggest we break for a moment to discuss the surreal professional ethics at play, which are that I can't pretend I don't know she's got a cloak-and-dagger baby with the world's wealthiest human hiding upstairs. Peculiarly when she invited me hither. It'southward a calming catamenia that breaks with a sitcom punch line: total-blown infant screams upstairs, followed by the voice of a woman pleading SHH. Now we both showtime laughing.

Did she actually think I wasn't going to hear a baby?

Grimes but shakes her head. "She's a little colicky too." She laughs over again and buries her confront in her easily. "I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking."

Congratulations to Grimes and Elon Musk on the birth of their second child together! It'due south a girl!

You probably have some questions.

When Grimes was meaning with 10 in 2020, she had a clear sense of the boy he'd turn out to exist. "I just had a vibe," she says. "I was like, 'I feel like he's going to be a peaceful giant.' " She was right.

Grimes, meanwhile, used to get called "waifish" then often in profiles that she railed confronting it in a viral 2013 Tumblr post. The final month of her pregnancy with X, she couldn't walk. "He was pressing on my fretfulness, so I kept collapsing," she says. "I took a few steps and complanate. It was kind of scary, because you don't desire to autumn a lot when you lot're eight months pregnant. So I would but crawl to the bath and crawl back or whatever." At one indicate during the pregnancy, she idea she was dying. "Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary." She and Musk wanted more kids, but she feared serious complications.

Concluding fall, though, Musk appeared to confirm rumors that they'd dissever. "Grimes and I are, I'd say, probably semi-separated," he told Time, which named him its 2021 Person of the Year. He chalked this up to busy careers in distant cities. He was spending more time in Texas, where SpaceX operates its Starbase complex and Tesla is opening a new Gigafactory. Grimes was bunkered in Los Angeles with X and working on Volume ane. Around the time of her daughter'due south birth in December, though, she relocated total time to Austin, and that's where I'm meeting her—on a sleepy neighborhood cul-de-sac 15 minutes from downtown, less than an hour by private jet from Starbase, and a short drive from the Tesla factory.

Close followers of Grimes on social media may call back that she was definitely not pregnant during the latter months of 2021. She and Musk used a surrogate this time, which in combination with the pandemic enabled them to keep their daughter a secret, right upwards until Y shared the news merely now on her own.

That's what they call her, by the way: Y. She'south got a full name, just this doesn't seem like the moment to ask for it. If today'due south excitement turns out to be how the earth learns that X has a little sister, well, at least Grimes did information technology her way.

So, expect—are Grimes and Musk however together?

Yes. No. What do you lot mean by "together"?

"There's no existent word for it," she begins. "I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we're very fluid. We alive in separate houses. We're best friends. We meet each other all the time…. We simply have our own matter going on, and I don't expect other people to understand it." What matters, I offering, is that they're happy. Then are they? "Yeah," she says. "This is the best it's e'er been.... Nosotros just need to exist gratis." They plan to take more children too. "We've always wanted at to the lowest degree three or iv."

Grimes was a musical autodidact who went viral in 2010 with some of the very beginning songs she fabricated on GarageBand, so spent a decade creating every single note in a male-dominated industry, no matter how much unrequested help men kept offering. She continued with Musk through Twitter in 2018, which is how he discovered they'd made the same pun about a night theory of A.I.-authorized torture called Roko's basilisk. (He tweeted "Rococo basilisk"; years earlier, she'd fabricated a music video featuring a character chosen Rococo Basilisk.) While the world was huddled indoors, Tesla took off similar a BFR—that'due south an inside joke for the SpaceX junkies in the house—sending Musk's net worth into the stratosphere, and he seemed to please in provoking his trolls. For Grimes, the paring to her reputation has been real. Overnight, a clamper of her core constituency—the internet—turned on her. She was no longer a revolutionary. She was Marie Antoinette.

"I feel really trapped betwixt two worlds," Grimes tells me. "I used to be so far left that I went through a period of living without currency, living outside." This was during and subsequently higher at McGill University in Montreal. Once she and a fellow ran afoul of the constabulary in Minnesota as they tried to sail a houseboat they'd built out of actual junk down the Mississippi River. The police impounded the gunkhole and sent them on their way. During her first shows as Grimes, she'd sleep in a tent when she couldn't afford a hotel. She's 34, at present, though, with a job and two kids. "I hateful, when people say I'm a form traitor that is not…an inaccurate description," she admits. "I was deeply from the far left and I converted to being essentially a capitalist Democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset."

We're approaching hour three of talking, and beer 3. Y is audio comatose upstairs.

"But at the aforementioned time…" I tin physically observe her encephalon cells saying spiral it. "Like, bro wouldn't even get a new mattress." This was back when they were both living in Los Angeles. Her side of the mattress had a hole in it. When she raised the outcome, he suggested they replace his mattress with the one at her house. The mattresses are fine now. Yet: "Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the point where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $twoscore,000 business firm? Where the neighbors, like, moving-picture show us, and in that location's no security, and I'm eating peanut butter for viii days in a row?" She is well aware that many run across Musk as some apotheosis of luxurious excess, and Grimes is here to tell you she fuckin' wishes.

This dwelling house in Austin could be any house in whatsoever upscale neighborhood. It'south got a gorgeous view of the Colorado River in the back and a tiny pool that she has no plans to use considering she's not a big fan of sunday. It's a prissy house. It's no Versailles.

"I'm non super into amenities," she says. "But, um, I demand nutrition and stuff."

Grimes often describes her music as "post-internet," because the entire history of sound is only a click away, from Nine Inch Nails to Hildegard von Bingen's 12th-century chanting and Stravinsky to Mariah Carey's daunting octaves, gear up for her to pluck, bend, shape, and morph. If you lot autumn into the category of people who'd never heard of her until she met Musk, 2015'due south "Impale V. Maim," one of the biggest hits off her fourth album, Art Angels, is the perfect four-minute crash form. It'south a pulsing, menacing dance-punk rager, told from the perspective of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Role II, only in the Grimes remix, he's a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral conundrum. Just your garden-diverseness pop disquisition on the nature of man and the inexorable pull toward brutality and anarchy. "Impale V. Maim" has been streamed 72 million times on Spotify lone. Decades from at present, it'll still sound like a revolution.

Volume 1 remains a work in progress, but the 15 songs Grimes has got so far represent her about audacious work all the same, each vocal its own planet of sound—well-baked California popular, club shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, "fairycore." The album takes identify in the distant hereafter, at a stage of technological advancement when you can upload your consciousness into a robotic torso and essentially alive forever as a Cymek, in the parlance of science-fiction aficionados. ("I feel like Jeff Bezos is gonna exist a Cymek," says Grimes.) Her space opera's antihero is a Cymek she calls "the dark king," the world'due south greatest engineer, whom Grimes featured in the video for her recent single "Thespian of Games." By the fourth dimension our story begins, he's pushing 10,000.

Grimes is still hammering out the plot, just one key thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. There's a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes—the dark king'south dream daughter, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of being a muse) and there's a blackness swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes's feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, fall in beloved, and fight for each other instead. From in that location it gets kind of complicated. "Despite all my rage / I am still just a doll in a cage," she sings, paying homage to Baton Corgan of the Nifty Pumpkins, heroes of her wilding teens.

Book ane is Grimes's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, with a hint of Lemonade, and it was partly inspired past a theory of Musk's: that she'southward a simulation. "We keep having this chat where E'southward like, 'Are you real? Or are we living in my retentiveness, and you're like a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?' " If this sounds like he'south asking her if she's a virtual pleasance bot, that's non (entirely) what he means. Anyway, she says, she's never felt entirely real herself: "The degree to which I feel engineered to have been this, like, perfect companion is crazy."

Does she mean the perfect companion for him specifically?

"Aye. Fifty-fifty but studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And information technology's really annoying because people recollect I'm an airhead who went to art school." (She actually wanted to, merely it was besides expensive.)

A conversation with Grimes tin be like staring at a Tokyo subway map when yous don't speak Japanese. She's e'er using scientific terms and alluding to heady concepts, so checking with me to make sure I know what they mean because unremarkably I do not. If there's an airhead in this room, it'southward not her.

"Do yous know what a protopia is?" No. (A state of gradual progress toward utopia.)

"Effective altruism?" I hateful, I know what those words mean. (Using data analysis to maximize resource deployment to assistance others.)

"The Overton window?" I thought then, but I looked information technology upwards while she was in the bath and I was wrong. (The spectrum of accepted discourse and achievable ideas.)

"What nigh neuroplasticity?" Now I'g worried she merely thinks I'm stupid.

Grimes was raised as a strict Catholic, which she struggled with, though she loved the spectacle of church. The One-time Attestation was like an ultraviolent blockbuster. Biblical manga. She spent year ane of the pandemic taking intendance of X and plunging down a rabbit hole of Homer, Herodotus, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Icelandic sagas. An idea began to course: a space opera near the galaxy-altering events unfolding before her eyes, in which she has go an unwitting participant. A beloved story nigh some epic stuff. The future of civilisation. Simulated protopia. The dawn of creative A.I. Terraforming Mars. Hither was a golden opportunity to pry open that Overton window, Grimes-style. "The idea of the female Herodotus," she says, "nigh doesn't exist."

Grimes isn't just the narrator, though. She's besides a master grapheme, and over the course of written history, her archetype—the lover, the siren, the mistress—hasn't been treated with much respect. Book i alludes to Athena, Calypso, Persephone, the black swan, Anne Boleyn, courtesans, concubines, geishas. "These weren't but hot girls," she says. "They were the smartest girls, some of the most educated women of their time." They painted, sang, designed their own clothing. They were the Grimeses of their day.

And then they got written into history as some rich guy's sidepiece. "I ate my cake / I lost my head / Villain of the internet," Grimes sings on a Police-inflected track from Book 1 chosen "Marie Antoinette 2077." "I'm super inspired past the way women get pulled into orbits in this manner," she tells me. "There's this weird dismissal of them. These are some of the well-nigh interesting characters in history to me, and they're so demeaned…. I feel like the most radical thing I could do correct now is just become Marie Antoinette." She considers information technology for a second. "Infamy is kind of fun."

She quickly adds that she doesn't want this to become all about Musk. She says it often during our conversations, and she's referring to this article, merely she could just equally easily be referring to her life. The culture took sides on Grimes from the moment the couple appeared at the Met gala in 2018; their incongruous outfits, her looking like an interstellar Elvira, him wearing a prim white jacket, became an instant mismatch meme. Her Instagram mentions turned into a cesspool. She'd get on social media and defend herself. Gauge how that went.

"It killed me at first," she says now. "I spent 10 years fucking producing, writing, engineering science, every unmarried fucking thing on my ain. And I fucking proved myself." Her friends are all the same furious on her behalf, more than for the erasing than the hating. "It frustrates me because she's as bright as him," says Boeree. "When I see her referred to every bit the meaning other of another person, it's like, Oh, come on."

Over the years, Grimes has slyly rebelled. She let the paparazzi catch her in a Dune-inspired bodysuit and leggings while ostentatiously reading The Communist Manifesto. She lampooned her cyber-nymph persona past posting her "self-care regimen" on Instagram. ("I spend 2–4 hours in my deprivation tank, this allows me to 'astro-glide' to other dimensions—past, present, and futurity.") About one-half of the pop-culture galaxy thought she was serious. Until the day she dies on Mars, legitimate media outlets will be reporting that she had experimental surgery to remove blue light from her visual spectrum.

In other words, rebellion didn't work.

Grimes also started to feel unexpectedly conflicted nearly her role in this theater. For one thing, she liked being Musk'south girlfriend. She knows she's going to go slaughtered for saying this, but: "Personally, I don't think 'manic pixie dream girl' is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I understand it's supposed to exist a critique of sure things, but and then I challenge that critique." She began to reject what she calls "this misplaced idea of feminism of, like, I demand to exist my own thing, I need to be divide." She has kids with Musk. "Separate" is off the tabular array for good. "In that location is no way to extricate myself," she says now. And so she did what artists do: She turned her aureate cage into source fabric.

According to her trivial brother Mac, the Bouchers' childhood in Vancouver was similar Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in virtually every house on the street. Secret clubs in the basement. Bikes. Vancouver is likewise a port urban center, though, with lots of offense and pretty much every drug that enters Canada. By high school, they had more or less graduated from Stranger Things to Euphoria.

"I was like a mix of Jules and Rue," Grimes says, referring to the Euphoria characters played past Hunter Schafer and Zendaya, respectively. "That sounds about right," says Mac.

In other words, she was a hyper-smart, thrill-seeking, gender-exploring time bomb whose hobbies included rejecting capitalism, partying also hard, and dancing until sunrise, though Mac notes she was also an overachieving straight-A student, politically radical, and deeply involved with what was and then chosen the Gay/Straight Alliance. She tried LSD for the first time when she was xiii and has lost multiple friends to opiate overdoses. She would pay for drugs by doing homework for Taiwanese loan sharks. Mac, who is two years younger, got involved in sports instead, and he sounds almost amazed that he was the younger sibling. She was always doing what he calls "dumb Claire shit." He asks if she told me most the houseboat. Yes, she did. "That was ane of the first adult choices she made."

The Euphoria phase was less about disobedience, Grimes says, and more virtually Deoxyribonucleic acid, particularly that of her gramps on her father's side, whom she describes as "crazy" and "jarringly unwoke." "My grandad is hard as fuck," she says. He grew upward in poverty. "Super antiestablishment. Teach yourself. Don't rely on other people to teach you anything." She says he taught her how to shoot guns when she was six. Grimes'southward parents divorced when she was around 11, and her mother married a man with two sons, bringing her brother count to four. Her grandpa nursed her competitive fire. Yous gonna let your brothers defeat y'all? Being outnumbered by the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to bulldoze a standard transmission by instructing her to contrary the car to the edge of a cliff. If she lets the car roll astern, she says, recalling it now, "we're literally going to die."

She won't be forcing teenage X to pop a clutch or dice trying. He'll be in a cocky-driving Tesla, presumably. And anyway, she won't have to thrust X and Y into brutal tests of their mettle. Just existence the children of Grimes and Elon Musk volition be enough of a barrage, and the shields never seem to concur.

"It'due south going to be difficult for them," she says, "in a different fashion."

Grimes'southward grandad is nonetheless alive and all the same lives similar a hermit in remote British Columbia. One time he gave her some professional feedback: You actually demand to sex it up. You should be more like Miley Cyrus. "He was like, 'Your career is going to be way better if you start showing more than peel,' " she recalls. "I was like, 'Grandfather.' "

Grimes's outset record was a Dune-inspired concept album chosen Geidi Primes, a reference to the militaristic planet ruled in the recent movie by an enormous Stellan Skarsgård. (She dubbed herself Grimes because MySpace immune her to associate herself with three musical genres, and she liked the name "grime," then a nascent British music scene.) Her father read Frank Herbert's volume to her when she was iv. She loved it. At one Met gala, she cornered Sting, who starred in David Lynch's much-derided adaptation, and freaked him out with a heavy dose of Dune fangirling.

For years Grimes harbored a dream of directing her own adaptation of Dune, with the more than problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out, but when she heard about Denis Villeneuve's ii-role blockbuster, she fangirled all over again and signed on to help with the rollout, originally scheduled for Nov 2020. ("I was basically an influencer.") And then, she adds, she got canceled from Dune considering of the Communist Manifesto thing. She was crestfallen, but she understood. "There are things that are deeply non woke in the Dune universe," she says, then the studio had to be extra-cautious, and she was far from indispensable.

When she finally saw the movie, she realized to her astonishment that this story she'd adored since she was far also young for information technology, that she knew about by heart, that inspired her first album—this story was now her story. Specifically Lady Jessica's story. This goes by fast onscreen, but Jessica (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is not a married woman but a concubine. Grimes saw herself in Jessica, and she saw X in Jessica's son, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Paul is more than a duke'south son. He'due south a chosen one, tasked with becoming a great leader. "When I meet 10," she says, "like, I just know X is going to have to go through all this actually fucked-up shit that sort of mirrors Paul-type stuff." Watching it wrecked her. "I was just crying my eyes out the whole picture."

She knows this might sound absurd. Grandiose. She wishes it felt that style to her too.

"I experience similar there's very few people in the earth who could accept similar sentiments almost their son than Claire with X," Mac says when I relay this to him. I ask if it'southward surreal to lookout his sister live this life. "Aye," he says, laughing. "But I'g also non really surprised? Considering she somehow e'er gets into the well-nigh insane possible scenarios."

Past the summer of 2019, Grimes was in the early on days of her romance with Musk and getting canceled online for it, and she was likewise finishing Miss Anthropocene, her long (long) awaited follow-upward to Art Angels, all while her longtime manager and closest daily confidant was dying of cancer. Her life, she says, has always been "level-ten chaos." This was level eleven. She'd been making everything by herself for a decade, and she was sick of it.

She needed to figure out a new way to exist an creative person, which meant figuring out a new way to brand money being an creative person. "I detest touring, and I hate selling merch," she told her new manager, Daouda Leonard, during their start FaceTime call. He laughs at the memory. "If you know anything about being a managing director in the music industry.…" At this point well-nigh managers would accept hung up. Instead he said, "Cool, you lot're going to bout in the metaverse and you're gonna sell digital assets, digital goods. Okay. Trouble solved."

They got to work creating an avatar of her body, dubbed WarNymph, and in February 2021 Grimes became among the first musicians to sell an NFT collection of digital artwork, some with accompanying music. Mac'due south thought. She generated $6 million from that one drop—more than she'due south e'er made from any of her albums. They engineered a deepfake of her vocalization that she plans to release with other IP within metaverse experiences and gaming platforms similar The Sandbox, a sort of open up-source creative experiment. Look at fan fic, she says. So much inventive stuff is happening at that place if you know where to expect. She has similar plans for an A.I. daughter grouping she's designing named NPC, which is gamer speak for "nonplayer graphic symbol." She puts the A.I. girl group out into the world, you get make something with it.

The NFT projection was so lucrative that if it had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might not take signed her first major-label deal with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they've been great—but she only did it to pay for the ambitious videos she had in mind. The one for "Shinigami Eyes," a futuristic dance-pop phantasmagoria, was amidst the commencement music videos filmed on an extended reality (xR) stage like to what was used to brand The Mandalorian.

Of course, signing with a major label was considered yet another betrayal by the Grimes purists, only where they run across a sellout, she sees creative liberation. You lot sign with a label—any characterization, of whatsoever size—for money, which you can either put into your pocket or plow dorsum into the mission.

The foot traffic is heavier the next afternoon when I return to Grimes's house, including trivial Ten. He arrives almost 30 minutes afterward his mom and I accept settled dorsum into the anime nook, and every bit he charges through the door she leaps to her anxiety with a delighted yelp. He says a friendly hi to me and later makes a bid for her laptop so he can lookout man My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki's archetype with the giant Catbus.

In solidarity with all the new moms out there, Grimes is wearing the aforementioned outfit equally yesterday. She hasn't touched her makeup. Respect. While she gets 10 on his way for a playdate, I take in the view of the Colorado River from the living room. I look down and see a neat pile of picture books, and at the bottom, Time's Person of the Yr issue with X'southward male parent on the cover. The room is dominated by a massive red couch shaped like a giant Tootsie Roll, and it looks amazingly comfortable, simply the kids have done a number on information technology, possibly both numbers, so Grimes sits cross-legged on the floor instead, and we discuss the Elephant of the Year in the room.

"We live in this society right at present where people expect everyone to behave right, and talk correct," she begins. "You accept these manifestations of genius, but then you want them to behave ordinarily—simply the reason they're similar that is considering they're so disconnected from right behavior." Humans are beautiful and toxic in equal supply, she says. "Similar, we fuck up. We're all gonna do bad things in our life. We're all gonna practise stupid things." She'due south talking about Musk, but once again she could be talking about herself. "They're both such deeply original thinkers," says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar every bit her black swan in the video for a Volume 1 rails chosen "100% Tragedy." "The lines blur with them about whether information technology'due south fifty-fifty art versus engineering or scientific discipline, because actually we're talking virtually creating something that does non be."

From the moment they stepped out at the Met gala, every PR mess Musk created—calling an explorer who helped in the Thailand cave rescue a "pedo guy"; tweeting that "pronouns suck," which elicited a pained, now-deleted reply from Grimes; referring to Elizabeth Warren equally "Senator Karen"—has turned into a referendum on Grimes. "When you hate me / think it fixes yous to interruption me," she sings on Book 1. "I'll never fight you dorsum because / everything you hate is everything I love."

Grimes can get far more wound up on Musk'southward behalf than her own, simply 1 matter that really pisses her off is how many people think that she surrendered her bureau to him. They took her silence for complicity, rather than how she viewed her silence, which was not submitting to their sexist horseshit. Why should she have to respond to every scandalous affair he says? You don't think he drives her crazy too sometimes? Have yous ever been in a relationship?

Again, she doesn't desire this to become all about Musk, but…she wishes his progressive haters would bear witness some respect for the work, for actually accomplishing their goals. He's done more than than whatever other individual citizen to wean the planet off fossil fuels. He helped protect net service in Ukraine by making his Starlink satellite terminals bachelor. And Grimes is baffled that and so many people view his Mars ambition as some billionaire'due south boondoggle, rather than the essence of beingness human being and possibly, just possibly, the key to our survival.

"The Mars projection is difficult," she says. "At that place's no income for information technology. There'south no way for it to make money." Y'all tin can't make money, after all, without customers. "Information technology'south for the do good of humanity, and information technology'south dangerous and information technology'south expensive, and people are like, He'due south hoarding money! No, he's spending everything on R&D." She knows she can audio likewise admiring, and she knows it'll get her mocked. Spiral it.

"Bro might say a lot of stupid shit," she says finally, "but he does the right matter."

In the days subsequently I render abode from Austin, I settle into a new morning routine: Wake up, check my phone, and read the texts that Grimes sent the dark before at around two a.m. She's as nocturnal equally ever.

"I would literally dice for a time machine simply particularly for like pre civ type stuff," she writes during an exchange about the earliest known tattoos. "Similar human information technology must have been Hard. The aesthetics of that time r but similar next level like haha they had insanely skilful manner." She sends a photo she institute online. "Similar this daughter looks like she's dressed in Yeezy." She gives me fun assignments, then checks to see if I've done them. ("Did u read the omegas short story at the get-go of life 3.0 by Max tegmark yet?" I did. Listen-blown emoji.)

Ane forenoon I wake to a text almost Musk. "Hahaha e says he'll do an interview with y'all surprisingly."

A calendar week afterward, shortly before midnight on a Fri, Grimes calls from Musk's Tesla and puts them on speakerphone. It's engagement night. They've got a sitter for X and Y, and they're going to the movies—an early on cut of dailies by a managing director friend. Nosotros've got 12 minutes to talk. Musk is in the driver's seat letting the car do the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his memory about the chorus to "Player of Games," which dropped in December and is more or less about him: "If I loved him whatever less I'd make him stay / just he has to exist the best histrion of games."

"I wouldn't say I have to be the best role player of games," Musk says. He thinks the guy in the song sounds "somewhat overwrought." Grimes concedes a bit of dramatic license, but "information technology rhymes well." He does like strategy games an awful lot, though, and she asks for permission to share that he has the top score on a popular civilisation-edifice game called The Battle of Polytopia, which Musk describes as a "much more circuitous version of chess." He's even bested Polytopia's creator, Felix Ekenstam. "I literally shell him at his own game," Musk says. (He's also lost a bunch to Ekenstam too.)

Grimes and Musk agree that living separately is wise. They're just too different on the basic stuff. He likes things "reasonably neat." She likes to be able to encounter everything she owns, all at once. He likes quality blueprint, clean aesthetics. She likes Death Note rugs from Etsy.

"You did take that cool vintage Japanese Metropolis poster for a bit," Grimes points out.

"That was yours."

"Oh yeah," she says. "Truthful."

As the Tesla beeps and begins to park itself, Musk sums up his position: "I just don't similar things to exist messy and anime."

When "Player of Games" starting time dropped, Grimes's fans causeless information technology was near her rumored separate from Musk, when in fact they were welcoming their second child and spending the holidays together as a family. The idea for the song came to her during a chat with friends two years ago while she was three or four months pregnant with X, when Musk casually mentioned that he planned to depart for Mars in 10 years. She froze.

"I was like, 'Uhhh….' " She remembers laughing nervously. "I said, 'Could we make it 20?' "

"It wasn't new data," Musk says in the auto, lightly protesting when I bring this up. "I've been maxim since before she was pregnant that I was going to Mars." Certain, she replies, but "I didn't know yous were going, similar, this soon." She is still trying to convince Musk to stick around longer, but either style she came out of information technology with a killer vocal for her space opera.

"Actor of Games" isn't nearly their breakup. It's nearly going into space (sort of). For most parents, even 20 years from now would be also presently. Not for Grimes. "The thing is, I fuckin' live and dice by the mission. I believe in the mission." She'd used that phrase oft—"the mission"—and gradually I realized it was a name. Uppercase M. When I asked what she meant by it, she replied without hesitation: "Sustainable energy, multiplanetary species. The preservation of consciousness." Concluding March, Grimes wrote on Instagram that she was "ready to die with the red dirt of Mars beneath my feet." Now she talks as though it's a fait accompli. "I will probably get when I'one thousand, like, 65 or so," she tells me, the aforementioned way y'all might say information technology's always been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Difficult to attain, probably out of your price range, simply doable in theory.

She tells me she's worried she came off ranty and cynical the previous solar day, when in reality she'south closer to a pure idealist. This extends to A.I., she says. Why is everyone and so gloomy about our cybernetic future? What if A.I. likes humanity? What if it winds up existence all of our creative best and none of our violent worst? What would that wait like? I suggest later on via text that her proverbial glass is 60 pct full, and she replies: "Im glass 90% full."

Martian travel, she argues, "is just another Overton window chat." Airplanes have existed for but over a century. The infinite program was fighting for survival a decade ago. And yet Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning-prove fixture—went to space last December. She snorts at the idea, though, of Mars every bit space tourism for the 0.one percent: "There's not gonna be any makeup or Postmates. It's definitely gonna suck. And definitely early on death for certain." Either way, she's volunteering. "I'd rather die trying to do something impossible and mayhap failing," she says, "than just keep releasing cute pop songs."

In the meantime, Grimes gets to turn the whole experience into art, and her kids get a digital-age version of Jedi training. When Musk and Grimes first met, he was Tony Stark and she was his kooky Pepper Potts. Now their domestic life is more similar the Incredibles. Her part with X, she says, is "handling his creative stuff." She's ready to start him on Ableton Live, the digital audio software, and she'southward taken him to his first rave, though he left at 11:30 p.1000.

Grimes has grown semi-comfortable with Musk treating X similar his little captain of industry, but she says things will be different with their daughter. Quick story: In 2016, when my ain girl was six, I took her to her first concert, Grimes opening for Florence + the Machine at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The adjacent dark, before the bear witness, the FBI warned Grimes that a stalker known to them was believed to have bought a ticket and could be in the audition. This was merely days after Christina Grimmie, a vocalist who rose to fame on The Voice, was murdered after a prove past a deranged fan. Grimes played half her set that night through panic attacks, then walked off.

Suffice to say the public won't exist seeing much of her daughter.

"The all-time situation hither," she says, "is me training the daughter and him"—Musk— "training the boy."

Y'southward face may be off-limits to the outside earth, but since appointment night with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her girl'due south full name. She knows it'll surface eventually, and also she's proud of it. "It'due south fire," she texts on Lord's day nighttime. Screw it, she decides. She'll do it her fashion.

"Her full name," she writes, "is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk."

Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform ane quintillion floating-betoken operations per second). Dark, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fearfulness it simply truly it'due south the absence of photons. Dark affair is the beautiful mystery of our universe." She texts me a vox memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl—"sigh-deer-ee-el"—which she calls "a more than elven" spelling of sidereal, "the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, non our relative earth time." Information technology'due south also a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, the powerful Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the band."

Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her name or go tired of information technology—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago—and if she ever decides to change it, her mother will exist first in line to help her choose a new one. She's already got dozens of ideas. She might even change it herself before this article comes out. In addition to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Crewman Mars, a nod to the Sailor Moon manga series. Exa Dark Sideræl was really something of a compromise, and she worries it's a piffling deadening.

"I was fighting for Odysseus Musk," she writes. "A daughter named Odysseus is my dream."

We speak once more by phone on the eve of Lunar New year's day and discuss Mars again. I apologize to her for the cheesiness of what I'thou about to ask: When you imagine your future life on Mars, is Elon there? Is he with you? Are you doing it together?

"Hopefully," she says, so goes quiet for a few moments. She hasn't considered this before. "Wow. Wow. Because, yeah, y'all're right, he'll probably go and then I'll come up after. Wow."

Mars would all the same be a brutal identify to live, it'd still suck, but at least E and c would be together, slap-up that Overton window to bits. And if Ten and Y want to join their parents, they would have a free ticket waiting for them. The rocket ships would depart in synchrony with the narrow window every two years when Earth's orbit is the shortest distance from the red planet, tens of millions of miles away. Grimes can see it in her mind's centre at present, them together on Mars, one big happy thermonuclear family. Maybe it actually is all only a simulation, only information technology all the same makes her smile.

TAILORS: LUCY FALCK AND ALEXANDER KOUTNY. PRODUCED ON LOCATION Past THAT 1 PRODUCTION. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

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